Friday, October 25, 2002

'I met David Bowie the other day at dinner," she says, evidently keen to get this off her chest, "and, I mean, he's obviously 10 times more famous than I am, but it was just good to hear someone else say it: that there are just nutters for paparazzi [in the UK] where they've got four tabloids competing against each other, whereas there's only one in New York. Nobody bothers him [Bowie] in New York, he can walk around there all day, and in London they'll be sleeping outside his house." It seems that, even more than the events of 1996, it was the subsequent media circus that caused Björk most grief. "I may not be much of a heartbreak because I'm from Iceland anyway, but you're actually throwing away a lot of your favourite people out of your country. John Lennon did it, too, right? He moved to New York because of this."

Björk has a theory. "I was wondering the other day whether it's because of the royals. Maybe nobody has any sympathy for them because they don't ever have to work, they just get born and they have money, right? So everybody thinks we have unlimited access to their private lives, because they're on this 'dole' from us. Well, they have a similar attitude to celebrities - kinda like, 'We made you this rich, so we've got unlimited access to you... to your life.'"